Neoliberalism and
the Control of Teachers, Students, and Learning:
The Rise of Standards, Standardization, and Accountability

David Hursh

1. Since the reign of Reagan,
education in the U.S. has been increasingly transformed to meet
the competitive needs of corporations within globalized markets.
Beginning with A Nation at Risk and proceeding through
the national educational summits convened by IBM CEO Louis Gerstner
at IBM headquarters, proliferating standardized tests and cries
for educational accountability, education is being reshaped to
support the now dominant neo-liberal economic policies promoted
by government and corporations. In this paper I will develop
a Marxist and Foucauldian analysis of the effects of neo-liberal
economic policies on education and the lives of teachers and
students.

2. In the first part I will
focus on the rise of neo-liberal economics and instrumental rationality,
the decline of the public good and public debate, and the redefinition
of the individual as the competitive, instrumentally rational
individual who can compete in the marketplace (Peters, 1994).
As Marx prophesied over one hundred and fifty years ago, under
capitalism individuals become valued only in terms of their contributions
to the economy as producers and consumers, or, as Marx and Engels
wrote, capitalism "left remaining no other nexus
between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash
payment' and 'egotistical calculation.'" All would be reduced
to "paid wage laborers" (Marx and Engels, 1952, p.
24).

3. I will then shift to examining
the consequences for education in terms of how schooling is regulated
and controlled, how students, teachers and schools are evaluated,
and what kinds of knowledge and thinking are valued. In particular,
I will argue that while conservative politicians have professed
that the State should intervene less in the lives of individuals,
that, in fact, the opposite has occurred. The State now intervenes
from a distance by employing expertise through "technical
methods such as accounting and auditing" (Barry, et al,
p. 11). Educational policy makers (principally composed of corporate
and governmental leaders) reflect this in demands for standards,
testing, and accountability.

4. State Education Departments
in 49 states have developed standards in the subject areas and
a majority of states have implemented high-stakes standardized
tests that students are required to pass for promotion from a
particular grade or from high school. The imposition of standards
and tests has enabled State Education Departments and school
district administrators to surveil and assess whether teachers
and students have "met" the standards. Consequently,
in an effort to raise tests scores teachers are coerced to "teach
toward the test" resulting in simplified and degraded teaching
and learning.
. The rise of neo-liberalism, the decline of personal rights,
and the attack on the public good

5. As I (Hursh, 2000) and others
(Parenti, 1999; Hursh and Ross, 2000) have described elsewhere,
the rise of neo-liberalism was partly a corporate and political
response to the hard fought struggles for an extension of personal
and labor rights beginning after World War II and ending with
the election of President Reagan. During that time African Americans
and other people of color fought for the right to vote, equal
education, and welfare rights. Women struggled for equal rights
in the workplace and home. College students fought for free speech
and the right to be treated as adults. Workers fought for workplace
protection andhigher wages.

6. In response, corporations
and governments in the U.S. and other industrialized countries
have developed policies aimed at reducing personal rights and
the power of workers, and promoting economic growth and corporate
profits. Neo-liberal economic policies mark a shift away from
Keynesian economic policies and concerns for general social welfare.
Instead, neo-liberal policies emphasize "the deregulation
of the economy, trade liberalization, the dismantling of the
public sector [such as education, health, and social welfare],
and [especially in the U.S.] the predominance of the financial
sector of the economy over production and commerce" (Vilas,
1996). The U.S. dominated World Bank and International Monetary
Fund has required national governments to develop economic policies
that emphasize economic growth and property rights over social
welfare and personal rights. Schools are not evaluated for whether
students become liberally educated citizens but whether they
become economically productive workers.

7. Neo-liberal economic policy
discourse has become so dominant in the public sphere that it
has silenced the voices of those calling for alternative social
conceptions emphasizing the quality of life measured not in material
goods but the environment, culture, health, and welfare (see,
for example, Dying for Growth:Poverty,
Inequality, and Healthof the Poor (2000) and Poverty,
Inequality, and Health (2000)for
analysis of the relationship between the neo-liberal policies
of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and the
collapse of the global public health system). Consequently, many
have acquiesced to the notion that we live in a globalized society
in which neo-liberal economic policy is inevitable.

A whole set of presuppositions is being imposed as self-evident:
it is taken for granted that maximum growth, and therefore productivity
and competitiveness, are the ultimate and sole goal of human
actions; or that economic forces cannot be resisted. Or again--a
presupposition which is the basis of all the presuppositions
of economics--a radical separation is made between the economic
and the social, which is left to one side, abandoned to sociologists,
as a kind of reject. (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 31)

In order to resist the hegemony of neo-liberal discourses
and practices, Bourdieu implores that we undertake a qualitative
and quantitative analysis of both the material effects and the
discourses of neo-liberal policies, analyses that will require
the insights of Marx and Foucault. He suggests that "there
are a certain number of empirical observations that can be brought
forth to counter it," (p. 31) such as "[w]hat will
this or that policy cost in the long term in lost jobs, suffering,
sickness, alcoholism, drug addiction, domestic violence, etc.,
all things which cost a great deal, in money, but also in misery?"
(p. 41) Bourdieu, in The Weight of the World (1999), has
undertaken just such an analysis in which he depicts, much like
Sebastiao Salgado's photographs of workers and immigrants, the
misery caused by neo-liberal policies on most of the world's
parents, children, workers, and students.

8. Numerous critics, including
Harvey, in Spaces of Hope (2000) have summarized quantitative
data on the effects of neo-liberal policies. Harvey, using statistics
provided by the United Nations and the Federal Reserve Bank,
shows that economic inequality has increased in the U.S. and
the world. Harvey further points out that the material conditions
of workers--deplorable working conditions and pay providing only
the minimal conditions for survival--"conditions that sparked
the moral outrage that suffuses the Manifesto have not
gone away" (Harvey, 2000, p. 44).

9. But, as stated above, we
need not only examine the material conditions but "the production
and circulation of this [neo-liberal] discourse" (Boudieu,
1998, p. 31). As Bourdieu states:

Everywhere we hear it said, all day long--and this is what
gives the dominant discourse its strength--that there is nothing
to put forward in opposition to the neo-liberal view, that is
has succeeded in presented itself as self-evident, that there
is no alternative. If it is taken for granted in this way, this
is a result of a whole labor of symbolic inculcation in which
journalists and ordinary citizens participate passively and,
above all, a certain number of intellectuals participate actively.
(Bourdieu, 1998, p. 29)

Neo-liberalism: The Relevance of Marx and Engels

10. While the discourse of globalization
and neo-liberal economic policy is new, the expansion of the
economy around the globe and the commodification of the worker
is not. Over one hundred and fifty years ago Marx and Engels
commented on just such developments in The Manifesto of the
Communist Party. As Harvey states:

[w]hat we now call 'globalization' has been around in some
form or another for a very long time--at least as far back as
1492 if not before. The phenomenon and its political-economic
consequences have likewise been the subject of commentary, not
least by Marx and Engels who, in The Manifesto of the Communist
Party, published an impassioned as well as thorough analysis
of it. (Harvey, 2000, p. 21)

While much of the Manifesto has become outdated or
reflects an inadequate understanding of the world beyond Europe
and the U.S., much remains relevant. For example, Marx and Engels
accurately describe current globalization as follows:

The need for a constantly expanding market chases the bourgeoisie
over the whole surface of the globe. It must settle everywhere,
establish connexions everywhere. The bourgeoisie has through
its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character
to production and consumption in every country. . . . All old
established industries have been destroyed or are daily being
destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction
becomes a life or death question for all civilized nations, by
industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but
raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose
products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter
of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production
of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction
the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old
local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse
in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. (Marx
and Engels, 1952, pp. 46-7)

The impact of global capital on the worker, whether "the
physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science,"
is accurately presaged by Marx and Engels. "It has resolved
personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless
indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single unconscionable
freedom--Free Trade" (Marx and Engels, p. 44). It is clear
that for Marx and Engels, "workers" refer to everyone
other than corporate owners or capitalists, and all are degraded.
Further, this is exactly, as Peters describes, the plight of
the individual under neo-liberalism: the individual is free,
free to compete in the market place (Peters, 1994, p. 66).

11. Not only, write Marx and
Engels, are workers reduced to commodities to be exchanged, but
such processes create laborers alienated from their own creative
capacities. "Laborers," writes Harvey, "are necessarily
alienated because their creative capacities are appropriated
as the commodity labor power by capitalists." Laborers continually
face "skilling, deskilling, and reskilling of the powers
of labor in accord with technological requirements" and
the "acculturation to routinization of tasks" (Harvey,
2000, p. 103).

12. In terms of education this
results in focusing on producing efficient workers who are able
to adapt and develop new skills and work toward the goals of
ownership. As Harvey notes, "[o]n the one hand capital requires
educated and flexible laborers, but on the other hand it refuses
the idea that laborers should think for themselves. While education
of the laborer appears important it cannot be the kind of education
that permits free thinking" (Harvey, 2000, p. 103).

Education, and the rise of standards, testing, and accountability

13. The hegemony of globalized
neo-liberal economic policies has contributed to redefining education
in terms of its contribution to the economy. As Blackmore states:
"Education has, in most instances, been reshaped to become
the arm of national economic policy, defined both as the problem
(in failing to provide a multi-skilled flexible workforce) and
the solution (by upgrading skills and creating a source of national
export earnings" (Blackmore, 2000, 134). As one economist
affiliated with Argentina's Ministry of Economics stated: "What
we try to measure is how well the training provided by each school
fits the needs of production and the labor market" (Puiggros,
2000, p. 84).

14. Corporate leaders and their
allies in government have always endeavored to shape education
to fit the needs of business. In the early 1900s, "productivity
expert" Frederic Winslow Taylor promoted scientific efficiency
as a way of increasing worker productivity. Curriculum theorists
and education policy makers as a way of improving educational
productivity quickly adopted Taylor's principles and techniques.
David Snedden of Massachusetts, a powerful state commissioner
in the early part of the century, argued that schools should
aid the economy to function as efficiently as possible by sorting
and training students for their "probable destinies"
in the workforce. The education efficiency movement emphasized
hierarchical decision making with experts conceptualizing educational
goals, curriculum, and pedagogy to be carried out by teachers.
Schools have been seen, writes historian Fones-Wolf, as a "means
of socializing workers for the factory, and as a way of promoting
social and political stability" (Fones-Wolf, 1994, p. 190).

15. However, under post-Fordist
neo-liberal economics, the collaboration between corporations,
government and education have become stronger. For example, in
1995, Undersecretary of Education, Marshall Smith, called for
schools to meet the "ever changing challenges of international
competition and the changing workplace." In the spring of
1996, the nation's governors held a first educational summit
in the headquarters of corporate giant IBM. A working paper,
developed under the direction of IBM's CEO Louis Gerstner, stated:

We believe that efforts to set clear, common, and community-based
academic standards for students in a given school district or
state is a necessary step in any effort to improve student performance.
We are convinced that technology, if applied thoughtfully and
well-integrated into the curriculum, can be used to boost student
performance and ensure a competitive edge in the workforce. (Education
Week, 1996)

Governmental and privately funded groups, such as the National
Center for Education and the Economy, focus their reform efforts
on developing students' knowledge, skills and attitudes to be
productive workers.

16. The second educational summit
in the fall of 1999, again held at IBM headquarters and directed
by Gerstner, called for reforms that would explicitly transform
schools to meet corporate expectations. This summit called for
"every state [to] adopt standards backed-up by standardized
tests [and] to set up a system of 'rewards and consequences'
for teachers, students, and schools based on those tests"
(Miner, 1999/2000, p. 3). Similarly, the National Alliance of
Business, in Standards Mean Business, clearly lays out
the agenda of standards, assessment and accountability: "A
standards-driven reform agenda should include content
and performance standards, alignment of school processes with
the standards, assessments that measure student achievement
against world-class levels of excellence, information about student
and school performance, and accountability for results"
(n.d. p. 4., italics added).

17. Consequently, states are
developing subject area standards and then aligning the standards
with statewide standardized tests (although inadequately so that
the tests rarely assess students on the standards). Increasingly,
standardized test scores are being used by school districts to
determine whether students should be promoted to the next grade
or from high school. Further, some states, such as Florida and
New York, are using test scores to rank schools and districts
with the purpose of "rewarding" those teachers and
schools with high scores and "punishing" those with
low. To date, all but one of the states have followed the route
of developing standards and implemented standardized tests.

18. The effort to impose standards,
assessments, and accountability has been devastating for teachers
and students. McNeil, in Contradictions of School Reform:
Educational Costs of Standardized Testing, concludes: "Standardization
reduces the quality and quantity of what is taught and learned
in schools." Further, "over the long term, standardization
creates inequities, widening the gap between the quality of education
for poor and minority youth and that of more privileged student"
(McNeil, 2000, p. 3, italics in original). Her research revealed
the emergence of

phony curricula, reluctantly presented by teachers in class
to conform to the forms of knowledge their students would encounter
on centralized tests. The practice of teaching under these reforms
shifted away from intellectual activity towards dispensing packaged
fragments of information sent from an upper level of bureaucracy.
And the role of students as contributors to classroom discourse,
as thinkers, as people who brought their personal stories and
life experiences into the classroom, was silenced or severely
circumscribed by the need for the class to 'cover' a generic
curriculum at a pace established by the district and the state
for all the schools. (McNeil, 2000, p. 4)

Governmental intrusion on the lives of teachers and students
though accounting and auditing

19. Over the last decade the
state has intruded into the lives of teachers and students to
a degree unprecedented in history. Teachers are increasingly
directed by district and school administrators to focus on raising
test scores rather than teaching for understanding. In the Rochester
(NY) City School District, high school teachers report that they
are pressured to teach toward the test. Sixth grade math teachers
receive from the central administration lessons with practice
problems that are to be used three out of every five school days
as preparation for the standardized math test. Elementary teachers
report that they devote more than a month to test preparation
for the English Language Arts exam by eliminating all subjects
other than language arts. In Massachusetts the test scores of
students are posted in the hallway outside teachers' doors. Nationwide,
teachers are being deskilled as they implement curriculum developed
by others.

20. Consequently, the question
becomes: How is it that social conservatives, who have traditionally
ostensibly called for the State to intrude less into the life
of the individual, "getting government off people's back,"
have increased governmental control over teachers and students?
In order to answer this conundrum, the analysis of Barry, Osborne,
and Rose, in their introduction to Foucault and Political
Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism, and Rationalities of Government
(1996) superbly describes the changing role and tactics of
governmental (i.e. State Departments of Education) and quasi-governmental
organizations (i.e. The National Education Summit). Barry et
al. write:

Paradoxically, neo-liberalism, alongside its critique of the
deadening consequences of the 'intrusion' of the state' into
the life of the individual, has none the less provoked the invention
and/or deployment of a whole array of organizational forms and
technical methods in order to extend the field in which a certain
kind of economic freedom might be practiced in the form of personal
autonomy, enterprise, and choice. (Barry, et al., p. 10)

State Departments of Education increasingly intrude into the
lives of teachers and teacher educators. They undertake their
regulation through, writes Barry et al., "technical methods
such as accountings and auditing" (Barry et al., p. 11).
Regulation occurs through technical means of standards, testing,
and measuring that "tie techniques of conduct into specific
relations with the concerns of government" and that "reconnect,
in a productive way, studies of the exercise of power at the
'molecular level' [in schools] with strategies to program power
at a molar level" (Barry et al., p. 13). Further, as reflected
in state departments of education implementation of standards
and standardized tests:

Public authorities seek to employ forms of expertise in order
to govern society at a distance, without recourse to any direct
forms of repression or intervention. Neo-liberalism, in these
terms, involves less a retreat from governmental 'intervention'
than a re-inscription of the techniques and forms of expertise
required for the exercise of government. (Barry et al., p. 14)

Governmental and quasi-governmental organizations seek to
govern without specifying exactly what must be done, but by presenting
the requirements or standards as rational and non-controversial,
and providing a limited range in which it must be implemented.
This makes it possible for social actors, such as teachers, to
have a false sense of choice and freedom. As Rose writes, the
'formal political institutions" govern from a distance and
"conceive of these actors as subjects of responsibility,
autonomy, and choice, and seek to act upon them through shaping
and utilizing their freedom" (Rose, 1995, pp. 53- 4).

21. The neo-liberal states,
through the use of standards, assessments, and accountability,
aims to restrict educators to particular kinds of thinking, thinking
that conceptualizes education in terms of producing individuals
who are economically productive. Education is no longer valued
for its role in developing political, ethical, and aesthetic
citizens. Instead, the goal has become promoting knowledge that
contributes to economic productivity and producing students who
are compliant and productive. Blackmore summarizes that "educational
policy has shifted emphasis from input and process to outcomes,
from the liberal to the vocational, from education's intrinsic
to its instrumental value, and from qualitative to quantitative
measures of success" (2000, p. 34).

22. Neo-liberalism, and the
move to hold teachers and students accountable through standardized
tests, needs to be critiqued and resisted. Bourdieu, in Acts
of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market (1998),
encourages us to resist the logic of neo-liberalism.

Everywhere we hear it said, all day long--and this is what
gives the dominant discourse its strength--that there is nothing
to put forward in opposition to the neo-liberal views, that it
has succeeded in presenting itself as self-evident, that there
is not alternative. If it is taken for granted in this way, this
is a result of a whole labor of symbolic inculcation in which
journalists and ordinary citizens participate passively and,
above all, a certain number of intellectuals participate actively.
(Bourdieu, 1998, p. 29)

Bourdieu reminds us that there is an alternative to the logic
of neo-liberalism and that we must reassert the possibility of
a world and an educational system that focuses on more than economic
efficiency.